Man in the Music

by Joseph Vogel

  An enormous amount of work went into the making of “Jam.” It began as an experiment with drum sounds by Bruce Swedien and R&B singer René Moore. Jackson liked what they were onto and fleshed it out further, creating the arrangement and lyrics. Then Teddy Riley was brought onboard to help with production. “It was just a stripped tune until Michael did his vocals and I came in with the icing,” recalled Riley. “I actually added most of the keyboard parts, all of the percussion elements, all of the horn parts, and all of the guitar parts to make the tune what it is today.”

  It was a unique combination, particularly for Jackson. The bass, so prominent on the Bad album, was left out entirely. Instead, the track was driven by the shuffling drums, scratching, and crashing keyboard stabs. Perhaps the most retro element was the horns, though this time Jackson did not use Jerry Hey for live instrumentation (Riley used horn samples). There were also more subtle sounds persisting through the song—scanners and sleigh bells.

  As work on the track progressed, remembered recording engineer Brad Sundberg, “ ‘Jam’ got bigger and bigger, and the mix was incredibly complex….[It] grew to the point where Bruce needed two consoles—in two side-by-side studios, just to mix it! We had at least four digital multitracks running in sync, feeding into two consoles—with Bruce and the assistants running up and down the hallway to mix this monster.”

  Jackson reached out to Heavy D of Heavy D & the Boyz to perform the rap solo. Heavy D had worked with Guy (Teddy Riley’s group) and Janet Jackson, both of whom he shouts out in his rap. Still, when Heavy D got the call from Michael, he thought it was a prank. He couldn’t believe the King of Pop wanted him on his record. Ironically, it was Quincy Jones who confirmed to Heavy D that Michael was indeed trying to get in touch with him.

  When the rapper arrived at the studio, “Jam” was still in development. It hadn’t been touched yet by Riley, and Heavy D recalled not loving it. In fact, he believes it was his suggestion that convinced Jackson to bring Riley onboard. Several months later, after Jackson and Riley had updated the track, Heavy D came back and laid down his rap.

  As Jackson’s opening statement on the album, “Jam” represented Jackson’s acceptance and seamless integration of hip-hop into his work. The single only reached #27 on the charts—partly because it was released nearly a year after Dangerous came out. But it holds up as a bold foray into new sonic territory, serving as Jackson’s bridge to the ’90s.

  2. “WHY YOU WANNA TRIP ON ME”

  Written by Teddy Riley and Bernard Belle

  Produced by Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson

  “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” was Jackson’s version of Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times” or Janet’s “State of the World”—a survey of the social landscape that alludes to a range of contemporary problems: homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, drug addiction, gang violence, police brutality, even an oblique mention of AIDS. With all these problems, he sings, “There’s really no time to be trippin’ on me.”

  The critique takes aim at the public’s—and especially the media’s—priorities. Yet it is not just a rant about the tabloid press. It is about the convergence of tabloids and entertainment coverage with “real news,” particularly with the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news, a trend that would only grow more pronounced over the course of the ’90s. In this way, as Susan Fast noted, the song effectively highlights the growing obsession with the individual (especially the famous individual) at the expense of the community: “Why, Jackson asks, focus on the cult of celebrity rather than the multitude of serious problems in the world?”

  “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” was written by Teddy Riley and Bernard Belle, Riley’s close friend and creative partner. Belle worked on a number of tracks with Jackson and Riley—he is also credited as a cowriter of “Remember the Time.” The first time Belle met Michael Jackson at the studio, he recalled, the artist said he was a big fan of Belle’s work. “I couldn’t believe it. I was floored, and I wanted to pass out. I was actually shaking this guy’s hand, and I’d literally grown up listening to his music! It took about ten days for me to adjust to being with him every day. But he made us feel so comfortable. He wanted to take that whole ‘icon’ thing away. He just wanted to be Mike in the studio, and that’s what he was. We ate together, we talked, we laughed, we had a ball, and it was great.”

  For “Trip on Me,” Riley came up with the groove and Jackson came up with the vocal arrangement and harmonies. Belle contributed the melody and lyrics.

  The song begins with a blistering guitar intro by Jackson’s longtime guitarist Paul Jackson Jr. (no relation), before unfolding into a funky, stripped-down rhythm track. The drums here are dry and compact. “By keeping the beat straight-ahead, giving the snare extra pop, and leaving the bass out,” notes music journalist Robert Doerschuk, “[Riley] brings Jackson’s vocals out more than Quincy Jones did on some earlier cuts, and gives more exposure to the dotted eighth-note hi-hat pattern that essentially defines new jack swing.”

  As on “Jam,” Jackson doesn’t so much sing the verses as narrate—this time in clipped, aggressive bites. It’s a very rhythmic song, the twitchy guitar and slapping drums allowing the artist to slowly deliver his litany of social ills. The chorus—led into by an elegant organ staircase—offers a nice release (“Why you wanna trip on me,” he shouts in full voice) and is reinforced by beautiful climbing harmonies (“why, why, why”).

  The song wasn’t released as a single (or intended to be), but works well as an album cut, effectively building on the New Jack sound and the socially conscious concept of the record as a whole.

  3. “IN THE CLOSET”

  Written by Michael Jackson and Teddy Riley

  Produced by Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson

  It’s hard not to wonder what “In the Closet” would have sounded like with Madonna—Jackson’s intended collaborator for the song. Yet the sensual track—which became one of the album’s three bona fide Top 10 hits in the United States—clearly found its way without her. In its 1991 review, The New York Times described it as the “best song on the album”: “It’s the kind of song that made Jackson a megastar as the age of AIDS began, all about desire and denial, risk and repression, solitude and connection, privacy and revelation. Once again, Jackson faces a temptress, embodied by a girlish voice saying things like ‘If it’s aching, you have to rub it.’ Not only does she want to seduce him, she wants to ‘open the door,’ while he insists (contrary to his introduction) that they ‘keep it in the closet.’ The singer is torn, wanting ‘to give it to you’ but holding back; his final whispered words are ‘Dare me,’ followed by the sound of a door—shutting, or being thrown open.”

  That mystery and ambiguity are what Jackson tried to sell to Madonna—he thought the restraint made the song more compelling. Madonna, of course, wanted it to actually deliver. But for Jackson, the song was probably the most sexually charged in his career, with its erotic, whispered confessions and suggestive pants, gasps, and groans.

  The track opens with an elegant piano introduction (played by Riley on a Bosendorfer), as Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, who was pursuing a music career at the time, provides a spoken prologue (she resurfaces throughout the track). The symphonic strings, meanwhile—played on live violins, cellos, and violas—heighten the atmosphere. It conjures a glamorous, romantic evening—until a door slams, the gyrating beat hits, and the real action begins.

  According to Riley, Jackson came up with that groove and recorded it on his tape recorder. Riley subsequently tried to capture it in the studio. “We used a variety of drum machines, but we compressed all our snares to make ’em pop,” recalled Riley. “[It] was something Michael came up with, and it came out exactly as he wanted.”

  Meanwhile, the track features a variety of other organic percussive sounds: breaking glass, slamming doors, snapping fingers, and industrial noises. Note also, for
the third song in a row, there is no bass line in the verses. Susan Fast observed that the song also sounds different and “exotic,” in part, because “of the way it’s heard within the context of the half-step riff. The parallel motion of the backing vocals, separated by the interval of a fourth, is uncharacteristic of modern Western music. And the reverberating timbre of the drum on the downbeat sounds more related to Middle-eastern than R&B grooves.”

  The song, meanwhile, expertly builds tension and releases. It even teases with a couple of pre-choruses (“She wants to give it, ahh, she wants to give it”), and a spoken bridge, before exploding in the real chorus (“There’s something about you, baby…”). It is one of the better examples of Jackson’s genius as a musical storyteller: the song has an arc. Even with the releases in the chorus, the song manages to sustain momentum. Listen to the way the song begins working up to a final crescendo at the 4:10 mark. For most artists, the song would have already ended, but Jackson is just getting started. The beat pounds faster; the singer whispers, pants, and gasps; the strings increase in intensity, until the song finally culminates in an orgasmic climax.

  After that, the falsetto harmonies and cries take the listener to the finish, as Jackson introduces still more industrial, percussive effects, concluding with what sounds like a rickety gate. Those who claimed Jackson was simply co-opting New Jack Swing would be hard-pressed to find a Guy song or a Babyface song that sounded like this.

  “In the Closet” peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and hit #1 on the R&B chart. Clearly Jackson was coyly playing with expectations in the title, given the rampant speculation about his sexuality. Yet, ironically, for one of the first times in his career, the artist openly expresses both sexual desire and fulfillment.

  4. “SHE DRIVES ME WILD”

  Written by Michael Jackson and Teddy Riley

  Produced by Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson

  The eroticism continues in “She Drives Me Wild.” So, also, does the influence of hip-hop. Late-’80s rap was suffused with street noise, led by the layered sound collages of groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. Susan Fast noted that such groups represented “a kind of peak in the principle of using noise as a signifier for dissent and critique.” The noise—sirens, horns, gunshots, dogs, and voices—wasn’t just random. It was intended to communicate a different reality; it was political. On Rhythm Nation, Janet Jackson wove some of those sounds into pop for the first time. On Dangerous, Michael takes it to another level.

  On Thriller and Bad, the artist stated that he expected every song to be a hit. No filler. Clearly, the calculation was different on Dangerous. There is no commercial impetus for “She Drives Me Wild.” It is, essentially, a hip-hop–influenced experiment with sound. In a 1991 review for The Village Voice, Chuck Eddy compared it to the musique concrète of songs like “Summer in the City” and “Expressway to Your Heart.” “If there’s nothing new happening on this record,” he wrote, “as certain fools have claimed (as some of the same fools claimed when Bad, which they now like, came out), how do they explain all this noise?”

  The song begins with a growling engine—then a car door shuts and a horn honks. From there, the entire track evolves out of sampled street sounds. “Even the bass is a car horn,” said producer Teddy Riley. Jackson’s gravelly vocal matches the raw tone of the track as he details a woman’s seductive powers with lyrics that would make Prince proud. The hard-hitting verses ease into the smooth, textured harmonies in the chorus.

  With the shuffling motion of the drum machine, meanwhile, Riley reverse-gated the snare to set up the backbeat, giving it both a crunching effect and a crack each time it hits. “She Drives Me Wild” also anticipates certain elements of the emerging G-funk sound, with its wide cinematic strings, sirens, and car sounds evoking the work of gangsta rappers like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

  Teddy Riley brought in close friend Aqil Davidson of Wreckx-n-Effect (best known for their 1989 Riley-produced track “New Jack Swing” and 1992 hit single “Rump Shaker”) for a brief rap solo in the bridge, which Jackson punctuates with a perfectly timed “whoooo!” The outro features some impressive rhythmic scatting and improvising before concluding with isolated harmonies.

  Jackson might have been a bit late to hip-hop, but tracks like “She Drives Me Wild” prove he was certainly a fast learner once he committed to it. Songs like this and “Jam” established the blueprint for credibly merging rap and pop.

  5. “REMEMBER THE TIME”

  Written by Michael Jackson, Teddy Riley, and Bernard Belle

  Produced by Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson

  “Remember the Time” was the song that sold Michael Jackson on Teddy Riley. At the time, the song didn’t have a name, or a melody, or a chorus. It was just a groove. But it was enough for him to hear its potential.

  After Riley played the track for Jackson, he remembered the pop star taking him to the back room. “I thought I was going to get fired. I thought I had done something wrong, but it was a chord that he couldn’t get around. He didn’t know the church chords. The first chord you hear on ‘Remember the Time’ started off that song in a very church way. He never started off his songs in that way, and that’s why he pulled me in the back because it was so unusual for him.”

  Jackson wanted to see if Riley really understood his music. “[He] was testing me to see what the chord really was and what it meant to me,” explained Riley. “And he wanted me to play it right in front of him on this piano he had in his room. He was used to the straight C majors. He wasn’t used to the C augmented chords.”

  Jackson came up with the main hook soon after, then met Riley and engineer Dave Way at the studio to get it down. “[He] sang the first chorus, first note [melody],” recalled Way. “Now, [Teddy Riley] and I were in the habit of singing the chorus once with all its parts and then flying it in to the other choruses. So when the first chorus was finished I stopped the tape and Michael, startled by this, said ‘Why’d you stop?’ to which we explained the flying in, etc. He said, ‘Well, I’d just like to sing each part all the way through.’ So we went back, started the song from the beginning and watched Michael sing each note and harmony, double it, triple it and then maybe quadruple—each time singing it perfectly, vibratos perfectly matched, perfectly in tune, rhythmically dead on, knowing exactly what he wanted to do the whole time. We were done with all the hooks faster than if I’d have flown them in. Flawless. That was day one.”

  From there—along with Bernard Belle—it was a truly collaborative process. On the back of a wood-paneled amplifier, the producer and artist sketched out some lyrics. Jackson’s lyrics are dated August 12, 1990; Riley’s August 21, 1990. These lyrics changed and evolved, as did the song, which they sculpted and refined for about a year.

  The beat, like the other Riley-Jackson songs, was hip-hop, but the bass was jazz and the vintage organ sound gave it a warm, rich, church-like feel. It sounded phenomenal and Jackson and Riley both knew it.

  Given the different chords, Jackson decided to sing in a lower register. Jackson, a high tenor, had never really sung like this on a record before. In contrast to the first four songs, which are heavily percussive, here he is smooth and melodic in the verses. It is a song about nostalgia, and that’s what his vocal conveys. The harmonies in the chorus are lush and thick, gliding over the punchy beat and airy strings. Then, at around the 2:20 mark, Jackson takes the song to church, ad-libbing, scatting, and otherwise pledging his love in gravelly exclamations. “One of the biggest things Michael really surprised me with on the Dangerous album was his vocal delivery on ‘Remember the Time,’ ” recalled Teddy Riley. “That really blew me away.”

  “Remember the Time” is now widely considered the fullest realization of the New Jack Swing sound and one of the best R&B songs of the ’90s. Teddy Riley has called it his favorite collaboration with Jackson. Released as the second single fro
m the album in January 1992, it rose to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the R&B chart.

  6. “CAN’T LET HER GET AWAY”

  Written by Michael Jackson and Teddy Riley

  Produced by Teddy Riley and Michael Jackson

  One of Teddy Riley’s goals as producer was “bringing back Michael to his R&B roots….I didn’t just want to go the pop route because that’s not what he called me for. He called me for that New Jack Swing. That’s what he wanted and that’s what he got.” This is strikingly evident over the first six songs on the album. All are rhythm-oriented; they make you want to move. While the sound is clearly influenced by New Jack Swing and hip-hop, it also draws on some more retro sources. In the case of “Can’t Let Her Get Away,” one of the inspirations was Jackson’s longtime idol James Brown.

  This was not by accident. Drawing from a CD of samples, the funky groove reminded Teddy Riley “of the James Brown sound. I could feel it. I thought I’d bring a shadow of some of the greatness of the James Brown production sound to this [song].”

  That influence comes through, though Jackson adds some of his own signature elements, including his beatboxing. Music critic Chuck Eddy describes “Can’t Let Her Get Away” as a “nonstop, nonlinear barrage of bopgun pops and bumblebeed beats, vamps and squeaks and gurgles, Cupid’s arrows flying through space and what at one point could be a drippy faucet [with] as much disco momentum as anything Jackson’s waxed since Off the Wall.” Music critic Ben Beaumont-Thomas likewise praises it as “fiendishly intricate, loaded with scratching, multiple layers of drum programming, and shiny smashes of hyper-artificial brass. In its mechanic complexity and tautly funky precision, it mirrors and amplifies Jackson’s corporeal and vocal exactitude.”